David Crosby: “I don’t believe in labels”

Originally published in Uncut Take 233 [October, 2016], David Crosby spoke candidly about his career resurgence (he was about to release his Lighthouse album), Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, a Byrds reunion and more..

“I’m having a great day, man. I wrote a new song last night. Got it demoed. I’m just a very happy guy.” It is shortly after noon in Santa Ynez, California and David Crosby is in excellent spirits. He has recently recovered from a stomach bug – “I was puking my guts up. Thanks for the visual, Dave!” – but evidently this has done little to dampen his mood. Jovial and wryly self-deprecating, Crosby talks enthusiastically about his current, unprecedented creative streak. Since releasing Croz, his first solo album in 21 years, in early 2014, he has multiple projects in the works. The first of these is Lighthouse, a new LP due in October: historically, his writing it all about space and melody, qualities that are reassuringly abundant on this latest record. Admittedly, Crosby himself is unsure what accounts for this sudden burst of creativity – “The truth is, I don’t fucking know. I wish I did! Usually, when we get to this stage of things, we either get lazy, or we frantically try and have another hit, which is not my MO at all. I’ve never had one!”

Crosby’s current collaborators – including his son, James – are the latest in a long line of musical foils stretching back to Roger McGuinn and Chris Hillman in The Byrds and, later, Stephen Stills, Graham Nash and Neil Young. Recently, his relationship with Nash has soured –his former band mate claimed, “David has ripped the heart out of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young” – although today Crosby speaks generously about the work they achieved together. He is adamant, too, he would reunite with CSNY during this critical election year to take a spirit-of-’68, anti-Trump message on the road.

It transpires that Crosby has a lot on his mind at the moment. A long-time supporter of the San Francisco scene, he reveals he missed the Grateful Dead’s Fare Thee Well shows last summer – “I was working, but I would have cancelled dates so that I could have gone and sung with them, but they decided they weren’t going to invite other people to sit in.” Crosby celebrates his 75th birthday on August 14 and he is mindful of 2016’s extraordinary death toll, which has claimed several of his friend: “When you get to this stage in life, you lose friends fairly consistently. But I try not to look backwards much. David Bowie would not tell me to miss David Bowie, he would tell me to make some new music.” Then there is the nagging question of a Byrds reunion: “I would be working with Chris and Roger right now if could. That’s not Roger’s choice to do, and if he doesn’t want to do it, I can’t make him do it.”

Despite these thorny matters, though, it’s apparent that Crosby is enjoying a period of extended tranquility in his life. “I’m looking at cows in a pasture,” he says, describing the view from his bedroom window. “I’m a country guy or an ocean guy. I exist in cities OK. In New York, I do quite well, I like it in London and in cities in Europe. I don’t like LA at all, for any reason. No, I live way out in the country. Around me is open, rolling savannah with oaks and grassland. It’s beautiful, very beautiful.”

Lighthouse is your second album in 2 years: you’re on quite a roll at the moment.
It’s actually even worse that that. It’s three albums! Croz was a year and a half ago. Lighthouse, that’s finished, that was me and Michael League, who’s the composer and bandleader for Snarky Puppy. Now I’m just about done with another one with my son James, who produced Croz. It’ll be a band record mostly but there’s one Joni Mitchell song on there where it’s just him on piano and me singing.

Which Joni song?
“Amelia”. Tasteful dude, me.

What’s the appeal of collaboration to you?
I like to write with other people because they always think of something that I didn’t think of. It’s as if you were a painter and you have a palette of colours: if you work with somebody else you’ve doubled the palette. I’m not in it for publishing money or credit, I’m in it for making the best music I can possibly make.

Have your writing methods changed much over the years?
Yeah, I don’t do it stoned!

But surely you wrote some pretty good songs while you were stoned?
Totally! All of ‘em, until more recently. I want so badly to write. If the muse is going to stop by, I want to have all the brain cells I can herd into one room there and functioning. I want to have the lights on, the windows open and be paying attention. In my world, in singer-songwriter world, if you don’t have a song that you can sit down and play to somebody and make them feel something, you’re not there. I can’t do anything unless I write songs. I can’t make a record and if I can’t make records I don’t have new material to go out and play and I can’t just go out and do my hits. That’s just not ok, that’s not good enough. Even at this late stage of the game.

Your songwriting career started to blossom 50 years ago on the Fifth Dimension album, after Gene Clark left The Byrds. Had you been stockpiling songs up until that point?
Not really. I was just starting to write. Frankly, I don’t think I was as good as Gene. I got better as it went along. God bless Roger, Gene and Chris and the other guys, I did get the chance to push the envelope a little bit.

“Mind Gardens” is pretty out there, isn’t it?
Yeah! They looked at me pretty funny with that one. “You want to do what?” But I was only just getting born as a songwriter, I don’t think I really blossomed until Crosby, Stills And Nash.

Was it competitive between you, Stephen and Graham?
Sure. Not drastically, but we were young guys with egos and we were songwriters – so of course we were competitive with each other. But the absurd advantage we had is that the three of us write completely differently – and if you add Neil to the mix, that gives you a bunch more colours to paint with. If you stick a song of mine next to a song of Neil’s, they’re different texturally and ideologically in every way. That makes for good records.

How would it go down? Would you all gather at someone’s house, bring your guitars and pitch songs to one another?
It wasn’t a formalised thing, but yes. As soon as we had a song, we’d run to the other guys and say, “Hey, listen to this!” They were my favourite people to show off for. They knew what I was capable of and they knew that if they thought a song was good, it probably was. We did that for each other and we would pick from the pool of songs that the four of us had, or the three of us had, and figure out what the record would be and what we were going to play live.

What did you make of Miles Davis’ cover of “Guinnevere”?
At first, I didn’t get it. He came up to me in New York and said, “Hey, are you Crosby?” I said, “Yes, sir.” He said, “I’m Miles.” I said, “I know.” He said, “I cut one of your tunes.” At which point, I choked on my tongue, completely fell down and my brain ran out of my nose. I said, “Whoa, which one?” He said, “‘Guinnevere’.” I said, “Holy shit…” He said, “You wanna hear it? Follow me.” He and this girl with legs up to her neck got into this Ferrari and drove to a brownstone halfway up Manhattan. I went with them. Miles played it for me, but I didn’t get it because there’s no recognisable part of “Guinnevere” in it. I was more concerned about my tune than I was in the honour of the fact that he used it as a starting point for one of his records. I was kind of snotty about it. But now, obviously, I am completely fucking thrilled.

You write very jazz, he was jazz…
There’s more history with Miles than people know. When we tried to get signed to Columbia as The Byrds, they didn’t know what to make of us. You’ve got to understand, the guys running record companies back then were failed shoe salesmen. Absolutely wouldn’t know a song if it bit them in the nose. Miles was on Columbia, so they went to him, played him the Byrds demos and said, “What do you think of this?” He said, “Oh, yeah. Sign them.” So he was responsible for Columbia signing The Byrds. Nobody knows that. You’re welcome.

You wrote “Long Time Gone” the night after Bobby Kennedy’s assassination, didn’t you?
You have to back up a little bit historically. This was an aggregate blow. First they killed Kennedy, then King, then Bobby. It was getting to be ballot my bullet and the heroes that we thought were going to turn things to a better direction were getting shot. We were all Woodstocky, the hippie generation, thinking we could stop the Vietnam War and achieve Civil Rights. Shooting King and the two Kennedys was like a punch in the face.

How does it compare to Neil’s “Ohio”?
It’s a similar thing, but “Ohio” was a more successful shot. The best way to help people do the right thing is to lead by example and not preach at them. But every once in a while, you simply can’t ignore it – like if your country starts killing its own children. So “Ohio” is probably the best of all those songs. Better than mine, better than “For What It’s Worth”, better than “Chicago”. I watched Neil write it right in front of me and when he finished, I called Graham and said, “Get a studio right now. Right now, this minute. We’re on our way to LA.” We went in and cut it, we had it out in 10 days.

There’s two political songs on your new album, “Somebody Other Than You” and “Look In Their Eyes”. Do you see a through line back to your earlier political songs like “What Are Their Names” and “Long Time Gone”?
Yeah, I do. I learned to stick up for what I believe in from people like Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie and they learned it from other people before them. I have a picture of Pete Seeger reading Ghandi and it goes back to there. And before Ghandi, somebody else was proposing those same ideas. But I learned it from Pete and Woody and Joan Baez and Josh White and Odetta and folk singers before me when I was a folkie and I think other people are learning it from us. It’s a thing that gets passed down.

Do you still consider yourself a folkie?
No. I don’t believe in labels, man. I’m a musician. They always want to label you. They did it with The Byrds. They were so desperate to label us because once you label the thing you don’t have to think about it. That’s a blah blah blah; now I know what that is. We do one thing, “Oh, it’s folk rock!” We include some stuff we got off Ravi Shankar: “Oh, it’s raga rock!” We do “Eight Miles High”: “It’s jazz rock!”

What’s your relationship these days with If I Could Only Remember My Name?
It’s one of my favourite records. I am absolutely and totally proud of it. It was a turning point in my life.

Is it possible to separate the music from the events leading up to it?
No. No, it’s not. It was a very tough time for me. My girlfriend [Christine Hinton] had just got killed. I was hiding in the studio, really. I couldn’t successfully exist anywhere but there. We had finished Déjà Vu, I had all these songs, and I just didn’t know what else to do with myself. I was distraught and crazy. They don’t tell you how to handle that, they don’t teach that in Home Economics or your maths class. It hits you. She was a 21 year-old girl – bam! – dead. I loved her and it was very hard for me. So my friends, [Jerry] Garcia and all the other people that helped with that record – him primarily – came by every night, they knew where I’d be, and whoever showed up was the band and whichever song I started playing was recorded. It was a very organic thing and a lot of kindness, a lot of friendship. A lot of wonderful people helped me do it.

And it was No 2nd in Vatican’s Top 10 Pop Albums of All Time…
I couldn’t fucking believe it! The best part was Pink Floyd were at No 3. I got an email from David Gilmour saying, “Damn it!” Neither one of us could figure out why we were on that list or what in the hell they were thinking. We laughed a whole shitload about it.

Lighthouse is only your fifth solo album. What stopped you from making more?
When I wasn’t making Crosby, Stills & Nash albums, I was making Crosby Nash albums. I liked working with Graham and we did some very, very good work on those records. I’m very proud of those records.

You’ve had a bit of a falling out recently, haven’t you?
Oh, yeah. Judging from the stuff Nash is saying in public, yeah, I would say so.

Have you heard either of the albums Neil has made with Promise Of The Real?
Willie’s kids? I saw a clip of them doing “Cortez”. They got Neil out playing some of the best guitar I ever heard him play in my life. The chemistry between them and Neil is excellent, the music is excellent. Live, I totally support him being with them, they’re fantastic. He’s totally right to want to take down Monsanto – they’re an obscene perversion – but I wish that Neil would be a little more rigorous about the records.

Neil’s a guy on a mission at the moment. What do you remember about the last time CSNY went out, on the Freedom Of Speech tour?
It was good. We had a blast. Neil knew that we would piss a lot of people off, singing “Let’s impeach the President for lying”. When we got to that song in Atlanta, Georgia, probably a quarter of the audience walked out – stomped out – giving us the finger and shaking their fists at us. It was pretty exciting. We loved that, a lot! And of course we knew it was going to happen so we had 11 camera crews, just in case.

It was an important time, with Iraq, George W Bush’s presidency and the war on terror. Considering all that’s going on now in America, if Neil came knocking tomorrow to get CSNY back together, would you go?
Yeah. Now is an important time for America in a desperate sense. We are quite possibly just about to destroy the country, if this lunatic Trump gets in. He’s an idiot, he’s functionally illiterate, he doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing and he’s insane and he will have the button. That’s not a very good prospect. Particularly not in the middle of a global warming crisis, which he is on the other side of. Particularly not when we’ve got racial tension at a peak high in the United States and he’s aggravating it. These are very tense times in the United States. It’s tough to be an American, particularly in Europe. What I do is tell people I’m Canadian, wear a little Maple leaf on my shoulder, that kind of thing.

“I’m the Canadian! Not the other guy!”
That’s it!

So you would all go out with Neil, if he called?
I can’t imagine how we wouldn’t. I don’t think he’s going to because he doesn’t need to. He’s doing great music and he doesn’t have to split the take with those guys.

The Live 74 album was amazing. Is there anything else in the CSNY archive you’d like to see released in the future?
Not really. To me, that’s all ancient history and I don’t really care about it. I wouldn’t spend five minutes looking around back there in those dusty old tapes. I’m completely busy making brand new music.

If you could give some advice to your 25-year-old self, what would it be?
Don’t. Get. Involved. With. Hard. Drugs. All it does is fuck you up and drag you away from your music.

Do you have a daily routine at home?
We do. What we try and do is get up, have a cup of coffee, and then we go for a walk – because I’m trying to stay alive. In my case, that’s an iffy proposition. Then we have breakfast and do the business of the day: the laundry, the cleaning, go to the market. If I’m lucky, I’ve got recording or rehearing. We try to accomplish as much each day as we humanly possibly can. But I spend time trying to write every day, every day.

How do you write?
I keep guitars on the wall right next to me. I’m looking at one, two three, four, five, five guitars in five different tunings right now here in my bedroom.

You’re 75 in August. Do you think much about your legacy?
No. I’m a bozo, man. I have a talent and I’m grateful for it, but I put my pants on one leg at a time, same as everybody, and I’ve made such egregious mistakes in my life that it’s given me a perspective where I do not look at myself the way other people do. I definitely think it’s not a healthy thing to do. You wind up standing there saying, “Gosh, I am significant.” All it does is aggrandise my own ego and it doesn’t advance me at all, doesn’t teach me anything and I don’t like it.

How’s Joni?
What I’m told is that she is doing well and that she’s working hard to get herself back together. She’s a very tough girl. I would bet on Joni rather than betting on anything else.

Have you seen her recently?
No. I got permission to come once, but when we tried to put it together it wasn’t a good day. So I’m going to keep trying until I can go and see her because when you’re sick or you’ve had a rough spot in your life, that’s when friends count. People showed up for me when I was in hospital, when I was on the bottom, so I think that’s a good thing to pay it forward.

Were you approached to play at the Desert Trip festival?
No. If somebody had approached The Byrds, I would have wanted to do it. But I think it’s a scam because all it is really is a parking lot, an empty field, a few acres of dust. So OK, you’re standing there for hours and hours and hours. They sell you a bottle of water for $5. You can’t tell who’s on stage because they’re a pinprick – that’s why Jagger waves a scarf round, man, he’s so far away you can’t tell it’s him. It’s not the way to see any of those bands, least of all Neil. The sound outdoors at that place is crap. The situation is crap. It’s a great story to be able to say, “I was there, I saw the Rolling Stones with Neil and everybody all at once.” But it’s a lousy concert. You could give me tickets to that and I wouldn’t go.

In the year when we lost Bowie, Prince and so many others there’s something slightly ghoulish about billing it “once in a lifetime”…
That’s merchandising. Truth is, the whole thing is about merchandising. It’s a gigantic money machine, and I’m not in it for money. That’s not why I came to the party in the first place. I’m a musician, my life is about music and I love making music. I don’t give a shit about the money. I don’t give a shit about being a star. I don’t give a shit about any of the rest of that stuff. It’s not my thing.

When you first got together with Roger McGuinn and Gene Clark, did you have a plan?
We were just guys who were folkies, who got together and we had seen The Beatles. So we knew what we wanted to be and we weren’t! But Roger and Gene were singing these songs that Gene had written after he’s listened to The Beatles. Roger could figure out how to play them in a Beatle-ish fashion and then I sat down with them and started singing harmonies. It was completely organic thing.

McGuinn, Hillman, Stills, Nash, Young…. what do you think links all your previous collaborators?
We’re all human beings and we’re all gifted with talent. We’re doing whatever our spirits tell us to do with that.

Has it all been worth it, so far?
Totally. Love it. I just wish I’d done more music and less drugs. I regret the time I wasted being wasted, that I could have spent making more music.